The Guardian rounds up several notables to address this apparently undying question.
Will Self: I'm still not convinced creative writing can be taught. Perhaps you can take a mediocre novelist and make them into a slightly better one, but a course can't make someone into a good writer. Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguru both did the UEA MA, but they were both innately good anyway. Some people swear by creative writing courses. I say, go and get a job, a fairly menial one instead. Otherwise what are you going to write about? Writing is about expressing something new and exploring the form in new ways. So unless you want to churn out thrillers or misery memoirs, you can't work from a pattern book. You need to autodidact.
As my students at UCLA already know is, my answer - maddening as always: It depends.
Will Self worked very briefly in advertising, followed by a stint as a (notably bad) freelance cartoonist. He has never really had a job apart from writing, and yet his bibliography is quite extensive. I wonder how he managed?
I think the real value of creative writing courses is largely environmental. Anybody who's written anything of a significant length or complexity knows that challenge number one is simply to sit down and write it, and creative writing courses are built around production: you just have to sit down and do it. There is also the fact that your peers are broadly self-selecting: they may not be especially interested in your work itself, but by definition they're going to be interested in what goes on in the background to it - even if only to wonder how you actually made yourself sit down and write it.
Of course, you can't teach talent. You can teach grammatical and structural competence, and you can perhaps (though this is an uncomfortable notion) teach taste. But you'd hope at, say, MFA level, the students are demonstrating enough talent to get in anyway.
Posted by: (The Other) Niall | May 11, 2011 at 02:50 AM
Speaking as a person who suffers from "spontaneous inspiration", being forced to sit and write for an hour does not necessarily initiate the creative juices from flowing. Creative Writing courses can teach the process in which a book is published, present the realistic endeavor of deadlines, and possibly "what not to do" while writing a novel, however, the talent, ideas, writing style, and initiative rely dependently on the writer.
Posted by: Davin Allan | May 15, 2011 at 12:14 PM